


With a Steady Hand, and a Little Time

by paperstorm



Category: Actor RPF, Marvel Cinematic Universe, Marvel Cinematic Universe RPF
Genre: Established Chris Evans / Sebastian Stan, Fluff, M/M, POV Outsider, POV: Anthony Mackie, Romance, irresponsible alcohol consumption
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-02-12
Updated: 2019-02-12
Packaged: 2019-10-27 02:55:19
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,703
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17758433
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/paperstorm/pseuds/paperstorm
Summary: Chris is a lot of human; big, noisy, unfettered emotions, sent out fearlessly and joyfully into the world, pulling everyone around him into the strength of his orbit. When he’s drunk, Anthony finds out relatively early into their working relationship, it’s about a thousand times worse.





	With a Steady Hand, and a Little Time

**Author's Note:**

> As usual a conversation with Sam resulted in this. It's more or less a cheesy love letter to Chris Evans because I was in my feelings about the big meatball today.
> 
> Title is from the song Fever by Deaf Havana

Chris Evans is a whole lot of human. Anthony figured that out about four minutes into meeting him, on the  _Winter Soldier_ set. He’s loud and he’s excitable and he’s endlessly enthusiastic. He hugs strangers as tight as lifelong friends, he laughs so easily, he yells happily about other people’s accomplishments and good news as if they were his own. He’ll shout from metaphorical rooftops about how much he loves his friends and his family. He’d drive a thousand miles in the middle of the night to help a friend if they asked – or sometimes even if they didn’t. He’s sweet and he’s caring and he’s unwaveringly loyal, and it’s all so big and bright. He’s eager to please, to help, to work himself to the bone and come back the next morning keen to do it all again. All his emotions are close to the surface already, and he doesn’t bother with even trying to hold them back. Anthony has known him for only a couple of months and he’s already seen Chris cry half a dozen times, over everything ranging from a sick family member to a sappy commercial with a cute dog in it. He talks so willingly about his struggles with anxiety and depression, opening himself up and allowing himself to be publicly vulnerable because he knows it creates space for others to do the same. He’s sunshine personified. Everyone adores him, and Anthony is no exception.  
   
Chris is a lot of human; big, noisy, unfettered emotions, sent out fearlessly and joyfully into the world, pulling everyone around him into the strength of his orbit. When he’s drunk, Anthony finds out relatively early into their working relationship, it’s about a thousand times worse. Chris gets a few drinks into him, and suddenly he’s far louder and everything has him full-body laughing and smacking himself in the chest and his uninhibited gassing up of the people he cares about gets exponentially more vociferous and the risk of something small reducing him to tears gets quickly much greater. One time, only weeks into filming, a few of them had gone to a local bar on a Friday night after long week, and Chris nearly got them kicked out because he wouldn’t stop shouting about how beautiful Scarlett looked in a navy-blue dress. Sebastian had clamped his hand down over Chris’s mouth and swore to him that if he didn’t shut up, he’d withhold sex for a month as punishment. Scarlett had snorted into her drink, and wise-cracked about how unlikely it was that Sebastian would actually follow through with that threat, but it had done the trick and they were allowed to stay.  
   
They unexpectedly have a few days off because a malfunction with the special effects left part of the set blown to pieces and it needs to be repaired before they can continue the action scene they’d been working on. Anthony invites Chris and Sebastian and Scarlett and Frank and a bunch of other people over to the house he’s been renting in Cleveland. He orders a stupid amount of pizzas and stocks the fridge with a maybe irresponsible amount of alcohol, and blasts some music and smiles around at his little temporary family as everyone laughs and dances and enjoys themselves. In the safety of the people they trust to keep their secret and out of the prying eyes of the public, Chris and Sebastian dance among a small crowd of people in Anthony’s living room, Chris’s big arms around Sebastian’s waist and their bodies pressed close. There’s familiarity in the smooth way they move together, like their bodies have learned from both the year they’ve been dating and all the months of fight training for their one-on-one combat scenes in this movie how to anticipate the way the other is going to move before he does. It would be almost inappropriately sensual for a party, if Chris wasn’t smiling so big and laughing so brightly and hugging Sebastian’s waist like he’s cuddling a puppy instead of his six-foot muscular boyfriend.  
   
Anthony watches them for a minute or two, watching as Sebastian laughs when Chris says something against his ear and then holds Chris’s grinning face in his hands. When he starts to feel a little voyeuristic, even though they are putting hands on each other in the middle of Anthony’s living room so he’s not exactly spying on a particularly private moment, Anthony heads to the kitchen for another beer. Scarlett is sitting up on the counter, her hair messy and her sweater slipped off one shoulder. She’s talking to one of the lighting guys, whose name Anthony is annoyed to realize he can’t remember right at this moment. Anthony grabs a bottle from the fridge, and Scarlett smiles at him as the lighting guy is pulled out of the room by another guest.  
   
“What’s his name?” Anthony asks, in a low voice even though they’re now alone in the kitchen.  
   
“Michael,” she answers. She takes a long drink from the red cup in her hand, and then winces and rubs her forehead. “Cut me off soon, okay? I wanna be able to stand tomorrow.”  
   
“I’m not your mother.” Anthony holds the neck of his beer bottle out towards her, and she bumps it with her cup. “Havin’ fun?”  
   
“Yes. I think we needed this. Set was getting tense, wasn’t it?”  
   
“A little, yeah. Long days.”  
   
“Is Cap still groping the Winter Soldier in the other room?” she asks, grinning wolfishly at him.  
   
“Last time I checked.” Anthony leans his ass against the counter next to her. “They don’t hold back, huh?”  
   
“I don’t think there’s a lot of places they can actually act like a couple around other people.” Scarlett shrugs. “You should take it as a compliment. Means they trust you.”  
   
Anthony nods, and smiles to himself. He does like that. He loves them both individually, and has every intention of remaining friends with them for as long after this movie wraps as they’ll have him, and he’s warm at the idea that they feel safe enough in his temporary home to be themselves, when they can’t almost everywhere else. Anthony isn’t particularly jazzed about the fact that they have to hide, but he begrudgingly understands the logistics of it.  
   
He’s only known them together. They already were when Anthony met them, and it’s sort of an open secret on set with everyone sworn to secrecy on penalty of Marvel’s wrath, but he’s heard stories about the two of them on the set of the first movie. Hayley Atwell, who Anthony has now met a few times, loves to tell and retell detailed, theatrical accounts of the way they’d pined pathetically after each other for that entire shoot, and how painful it had been to watch and not insert herself into their business and turn their ‘will they, won’t they?’ into a ‘they just did and now they won’t stop and they’re making everyone uncomfortable’. Anthony gets the distinct impression from the way she tells that story that she hadn’t held back as much as she claims to have, and Sebastian always alludes to the fact that she might have had some harsh words for him at one point about putting Chris out of his misery before he died of heartache. Anthony can only imagine what a Chris Evans with a crush he thought was hopeless would be like. He can easily picture Chris trailing after Sebastian like a lost puppy and lighting up like a firework any time Sebastian paid him any attention and deflating like a week-old balloon the moment Sebastian left the room or, heaven forbid, paid attention to anyone else in a manner that could be even loosely interpreted as flirting.  
   
“I do take it as a compliment,” he says, responding to Scarlett’s statement way too late.  
   
She squeezes his shoulder, and drains the remains of whatever was in her cup. By the face she makes and the pained gasp after she swallows, Anthony deduces it was straight liquor.  
   
The door to the kitchen opens, and like maybe he could sense he was being discussed, Sebastian comes into the room. His face is flushed and his hair is all messed up, strands of it pulled out of the knot he’d had it tied into at the back of his head. Anthony smirks, and Sebastian blushes even further, all three of them aware without anyone having to say it exactly how his appearance came to be as unkempt as it is.  
   
Scarlett hops down off the counter, and pats Sebastian’s pink cheek as she walks past him. “I’m gonna go dance with your boyfriend, since you’ve released your very selfish monopoly on him.”  
   
She’s gone before she can hear Sebastian’s response. “ _I_  wasn’t the one monopolizing  _him_.”  
   
“We all know,” Anthony tells him.  
   
Sebastian doesn’t like beer, so he grabs a cup from the stack on the counter and pours whiskey into it, topping it off with Diet Coke from the fridge.  
   
“Fix your hair, bro,” Anthony advises. “You look like you just got fucked.”  
   
“ _God_ ,” Sebastian groans. He goes over to use the shiny door of the microwave as a mirror, muttering something that doesn’t sound like English under his breath as he pulls the hair-tie out and drags his fingers through his shoulder-length locks, attempting to smooth out the tangles.  
   
“Evans is in fine form tonight.” Anthony grins as Sebastian’s cheeks go somehow even redder than they already were. He reaches over and claps Sebastian in the center of his chest. “Man, relax. It’s fine, I’m just busting your balls.”  
   
Sebastian turns around so he can also lean against the counter, and rubs his hands over his face. “He gets a little handsy when he’s drunk.”  
   
“You’re saying that like you think I don’t know it, like I haven’t been on the receiving end of one of his sloppy drunken cuddles. Which, admittedly, are very warm. And he usually smells good.”  
   
Laughing softly, Sebastian looks down at his hands, and then reaches behind himself for the cup he’d discarded in his haste to groom himself back halfway toward presentable.  
   
“You know it’s all good, right?” Anthony asks, serious just for a moment because he has to make sure. “You’re welcome to grind on him in my living room any time you want.”  
   
Sebastian nods. “I know.”  
   
They share a smile, and then a small horde of people burst into the room, and their moment is ended by loud laughter and the tail end of a story about someone falling off a chairlift at a ski resort.  
   
An hour later, Anthony is significantly drunker, although not as much as some of his other guests. He’s outside on the back deck, getting some fresh air with Frank, the smooth thrum of alcohol in his veins making everything a little fuzzy and just generally pleasant. It’s nearly one in the morning, and he should get to kicking everyone out at least before the sun comes up. If they have to unexpectedly go back to filming the day after tomorrow and are all still nursing 48-hour hangovers because nearly every one of them is well over 30, they’ll get in all kinds of trouble and Anthony has no doubt about how quickly the fingers of blame would be pointing right in his direction.  
   
A loud voice makes them both look up, toward the open sliding glass door that leads back into the living room. “His eyes are so blue,” a male voice is saying, nearly loud enough to qualify as shouting, and Anthony recognizes it instantly as Chris. “Aren’t they? You know.”  
   
He leans to one side so he can peer back into his house, and sees Chris hanging off one of the make-up artists, Kat, nearly draping his entire 6`2 frame over her and she, thin and a full foot shorter than him, is somehow managing to hold him up. Anthony is impressed, they should hire her for stunts instead of make-up. He still swears under his breath, laughing a little to himself, and heads in their direction to rescue her from 200 pounds of drunk, clingy Chris Evans.  
   
“They are,” she’s saying kindly, rubbing her hand on his stomach over his t-shirt. In a melodic voice like she’s speaking to a kindergartener, she adds, “so are yours!”  
   
“Isn’t he pretty, though?” Chris continues, babbling straight nonsense at this point. “He’s so gorgeous and he’s so talented and I love him so much. He’s so good as Bucky, I love Bucky. Steve loves Bucky! He speaks Romanian, did you know that? He’s so sweet, isn’t he sweet?”  
   
“Of course he is.” Her eyes meet Anthony’s as he approaches.  
   
He touches Chris’s bicep, squeezing a little to get his attention. “Hey, big guy. How’s it goin’ over here?”  
   
Chris cries, “Mackie’s here!” and without letting go of Kat, manages to drag Anthony into their little vertical semi-consensual snuggle.  
   
“Tellin’ everybody all about how much you love Seabass?” Anthony asks, and Chris nods against him.  
   
He isn’t slurring, so he isn’t  _completely_ gone, just drunk enough to be extra happy and extra concerned that everyone in the vicinity is kept up to date with whatever thoughts are currently running half-formed in his chemical-soaked brain. Chris giggles. “You call him Seabass.”  
   
“I certainly do,” Anthony agrees.  
   
Kat is squished between them, and is taking no effort to free herself from the embrace but Anthony is halfway worried she’ll be crushed if Chris decides he isn’t hugging tight enough.  
   
“I love ‘im. Loved him right from the beginning.” Chris laughs again, dropping his voice down to what he clearly thinks is a whisper but is still pretty damn loud to add, “he has a nice dick. I like it so much.”  
   
Kat cracks up between them, snickering into Chris’s chest, and Anthony struggles heroically to keep a straight face as people around them look over in amusement and increased interest, having easily heard what Chris said. “That’s nice. I’m gonna go find him, okay? Maybe you two need to go sit outside for a bit, get some fresh air into you.”  
   
“Tell him he has a nice dick.” He allows Anthony to move away but is still wrapped around Kat. She doesn’t seem to mind too terribly, hugging him back.  
   
“Yeah, buddy, I sure will,” Anthony promises, and only Kat gets the humor in it.  
   
She lets him rock her like they’re slow-dancing, and informs him, “it’s lucky you’re a good person, because you’d be incredibly easy to blackmail.”  
   
“Thank you,” Chris answers, like he thinks that’s the loveliest complement he’s ever been paid.  
   
Anthony keeps his lips pressed together to stifle a laugh as he leaves them, checking the hall and the dining room and finally locating Sebastian back in the kitchen, in amongst a small crowd of people listening to a crew member describe what had gone wrong in the explosion that halted filming and how upset Joe was over the thought that somebody might have been hurt. Anthony manages not to interrupt the story, and sidles up beside Sebastian to talk to him quietly.  
   
“You gotta come handle your boy,” he says, leaning in close to Sebastian’s ear.  
   
Sebastian frowns. “What is he doing?”  
   
“Climbing all over Kat and loudly telling the entire cul-de-sac about how much he loves your dick,” Anthony answers bluntly.  
   
“Oh my God.” Sebastian looks horrified just for a moment and then he bursts out into embarrassed laughter. “Please tell me he didn’t really say that.”  
   
“He said it twice.”  
   
“For fuck’s sake,” Sebastian complains, still laughing, and following Anthony back into the living room.  
   
Chris is still rocking Kat, hunched over her so he can hug her properly when she’s so much smaller than him. “He didn’t even love me back right away. Does now, though.”  
   
Gently, Sebastian touches Chris’s back, as he sends apologetic glances to the people around them. “Hey, babe.”  
   
Chris looks over his shoulder, and his face lights up like a six year old on Christmas morning. “Here he is!” he cries, finally releasing Kat from his death-grip and stumbling into Sebastian’s arms instead.  
   
Sebastian catches him, grunting at the impact. He hugs him, and then leans back enough to look Chris in the eye. “Havin’ fun?”  
   
“Love you,” Chris pronounces to him grandly.  
   
“I know you do.” Sebastian smiles a little and runs his hand through Chris’s hair. “And of course I loved you back right away, what’re you lying to people for?”  
   
“You didn’t,” Chris insists, shaking his head. “Took us three years.”  
   
“Yeah, but that doesn’t mean I didn’t love you back.” Sebastian looks highly self-conscious, having this conversation in front of other people, even though most of them have stopped paying attention at this point. He’s much more private than Chris, and takes a lot longer to get to know somebody before he’s comfortable opening up in any significant way. He still continues, like it’s important to him that Chris hear him say, “was just too scared to tell you. Scared you didn’t feel the same way. You know that, we've talked about it a lot.”  
   
Anthony watches as a switch flips and Chris suddenly snaps from happy drunk Chris to sad drunk Chris. His eyes well up with tears and his bottom lip quivers, and Anthony didn’t think people’s bottom lips really ever actually quivered. If anyone’s really would, of course it would be Chris.  
   
“No, no, no, none of that,” Sebastian says quickly, keeping one arm tight around Chris’s waist to steady him, and the other cupping his cheek.  
   
“Love you so much,” Chris says, and his voice wavers.  
   
“I know, sweetheart. The whole room heard you.” Sebastian smiles at him and wipes at the tears collecting under his left eye with the pad of his thumb. “I love you, too. Let’s go outside, okay? Give these nice people a break from us being all gooey and romantic.”  
   
Chris nods, and lets himself be corralled out the door and onto the deck. Anthony follows, and slides the door closed behind them. The other guests will still be able to see them through the glass, but at least cutting off their ability to hear will give his friends a little bit of privacy.  
   
There’s a large padded lounge chair next to the barbeque, theoretically big enough for two although likely not designed with the foresight that ‘two’ would mean two men over six feet tall with literal superhero bulk broadening their chests and shoulders. Sebastian helps Chris get down onto it and sits next to him, and Chris immediately crawls into Sebastian’s lap and wraps himself around Sebastian like an octopus. His shoulders are still trembling a little, and even though it isn’t the first time Anthony’s seen Chris weepy, and even though he’s drunk so it doesn’t  _quite_  count as actually crying, it still tugs at his heartstrings a little. Chris has such an enormous heart, and he’s so open and generous with it. The idea of him upset, even while intoxicated, over the idea of Sebastian spending three years thinking Chris didn’t reciprocate his feelings, is just sweet enough to have Anthony feeling sentimental as well.  
   
Sebastian rubs Chris's back, and is murmuring to him softly. Anthony doesn’t catch the words, they’re spoken too intimately close to Chris’s ear, and then capped off with a kiss to his cheek. Sebastian looks up at Anthony, nearly drowned in a pile of limbs and emotions, and asks, “could you get some water?”  
   
Anthony nods. He wades his way through the crowd and gets a bottle of Evian from the kitchen. When he gets back to the deck, the tears have evaporated and Chris and Sebastian are making out, intense and heated, Chris desperately rocking forward like he’s trying to climb into Sebastian’s skin. Sebastian’s hands are balled up in the back of his shirt, and one of them is moaning, and Anthony loves them both a ridiculous amount, but not quite  _this_ much.  
   
He lets the water bottle thump down on Sebastian’s shoulder, and Sebastian breaks away from the kiss to tilt his head back and look upwards at Anthony. The action exposes the long, dewy line of his neck, and Chris wastes no opportunity; pitching forward and attaching his lips to it.  
   
“Thanks.” Sebastian takes the bottle, and there’s an awkward grimace on his face, but he’s also grinning. That seems more or less to be his default where Chris is concerned. When they’re in safe places, Chris has no shame whatsoever, and he holds Sebastian’s hand and kisses him and cuddles him in full view of anyone, as long as they’re someone he’s deemed trustworthy. Sebastian is shyer, letting Chris be affectionate but with an air of embarrassment about it. From what Anthony’s seen, he doesn’t think that shyness translates into the time they spend fully alone.  
   
Chris moans – and it was definitely him that made the sound the first time – and he pushes his hips forward like he’s trying to get off against Sebastian’s stomach.  
   
“Really?” Anthony asks, exasperated, but fond underneath it.  
   
Sebastian shrugs one shoulder. “Dude, I know, but it’s either this, or he goes back to crying on your carpet.”  
   
Anthony points accusingly at him. “If you get jizz on that chair, I’m burning it and you’re buying me a new one.”  
   
He leaves Sebastian blushing and looking completely mortified, and smirks to himself as he shuts the glass door behind him and leaves them alone, because he won that round, even though his best friends are still dry-humping on his rented furniture. Back in the living room, bodies are moving collectively to the music again, and Scarlett grabs his hand and drags him into the throng. Over her shoulder, Anthony can see Chris and Sebastian still locked in an embrace on the lounge chair, and he smiles a little. Chris Evans is a whole lot of human, and with a few drinks in him he’s more than even he himself is able to handle with anything approaching grace or dignity, and Anthony loves him, and loves that Chris found another heart big enough to take in all that his can dish out.  
   
   
   
 

**Author's Note:**

> [come talk to me on tumblr if you want!](http://paper-storm.tumblr.com/)


End file.
